Electric Vehicle Market Share – EVs vs Plugin Hybrids.

I’ve done previous EV and Plugin Market share analysis on Seeking Alpha but now will continue that here on my blog instead. My goal is to update quarterly. All numbers are US only and all data is from InsideEVs unless specified otherwise. The last time I updated was in October and since then it seems like there has been a lot of Electric and Plugin news. Total plugin vehicle sales crossed 200,000 in the last 12 months and had the highest ever market share in a trailing 12 month period. Q1 Plugin sales rose 31.6% as compared to Q1 last year.

The number of available plugins also continued to grow. However, big auto just kept introducing more plugin hybrids. Not too many additions to available electric vehicles:

In spite of this, as far as the EV vs Plugin Hybrid share of the plugin market is concerned, things are just more of the same:

Electric vehicle sales crossed plugin hybrid sales in October 2014 and have never looked back since. Basically big auto doesn’t care what you or I want or what the data says. They want to convince us to buy their hybrids instead of electric vehicles and that has not been working.

Here is how the market share of the top plugin (EV and PHEV combined) vehicle manufacturers has changed over the years:

Plugin manufacturers not shown on the chart have a market share of 3% or less. Out of all the choice in plugin hybrids, it looks like Toyota’s Prius Prime and GM’s Volt are keeping the hybrids chugging along.

Here is what it looks like for just EVs:

The EV manufacturers not shown on the chart have a market share of 3% or less.

The biggest loser here is Nissan. Their improvements to the Leaf were too slow and too late. It let GM overtake them with the Bolt. We can already see the Model 3 ramp related uptick for Tesla in the last couple of months and as Tesla ramps production higher it will be difficult for other manufacturers to catch up.

Here is an interesting look at the ramps of the Chevy Bolt and the Model 3:

The above chart might surprise some as the Model 3 ramp is considered a failure for Tesla while the Bolt ramp is considered a great success for GM. The reason is mainly that Tesla set expectations for the ramp sky high while GM was realistic. In absolute numbers the Model 3 ramp is the fastest ever for any alternative fuel vehicle.